Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry (and Everything Else), but Were Afraid to Ask.

5 entries from December 2008

December 28, 2008

What better way to begin the new year than with
a moral tale? The fabled Dean of Student Affairs at S.U.N.Y. Oswego and amateur
ornithologist Robert Roc received a commission from National Geographic to write and photograph
an essay on seabirds nesting on a small and very rocky island off the coast of
Maine. It would take him all spring and summer, so he prepared himself
thoroughly and built an inconspicuous camp and several blinds at strategic
locations on the islet. He moved himself in before mating season started, and
he began taking photographs and copious notes.

As time passed, it became clear that the various
species of birds got along poorly, to say the least. They were always mounting
incursions into each other’s territory, and the larger birds preyed on the
smaller ones, either eating them or their eggs or forcing them to relinquish their
catches. Eventually, however, Bob became aware of one small seabird who seemed
to have a sense of altruism.

This bird, when it saw an altercation developing
between its island mates would attempt to break it up before it got started. If
the parents of a chick were somehow killed or driven off, this bird would
actually try to feed the baby until it became a fledgling. The good Samaritan
bird would even lend a wing in nest building if the builder were inept. Roc was
simply amazed.

He began to focus on the helpful bird, and at
last he became so interested in it — almost obsessively so — that all of his
efforts were bent toward chronicling this feathered friend’s existence. When he
sat down at his laptop to begin writing his article he soon found that he had
enough material for a book. The following fall he submitted his original
article to the magazine and began to write the book because, as he said in his
journal, “One good tern deserves an author.”

December 20, 2008

Of late I have been running across a prosodic term with which I am not familiar and that doesn’t appear in The Book of Forms: “heterometric.” I ran across it most recently in Stephen Murabito’s review of my book Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems in the current issue of Italian Americana (Vol. xxvii, No. 1, Winter 2009, p. 124) where he writes, “The restrained poise of love closes ‘My Country Wife,’ from Awaken, Bells Falling (1968), in balanced heterometric syllabics.”

Earlier this year I asked a correspondent what he meant by the term, and he wrote, “I have encountered numerous scannings of [his poem titled “Caravel”] and have made several differing ones myself. The way I read it aloud every line is hexametric. R[ichard]. Wilbur reads it with lines varying between 5 and 7 feet. I understand the term ‘heterometric’ to denote just what it's [sic] two parts suggest[,] ‘differing meters.’ Sometimes it's shortened to ‘het-met.’"

I replied that the reason I don't know what "heterometric" means is that the usual term for what he appeared to be talking about is "variable accentual-syllabics"; that is, a verse poem written in one prosody but containing a varying number of (in this particular case) verse feet in its lines: A classic example, used in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, on pages 42 & 43, is William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality."

Other prosodic possibilities are "variable accentuals" and "variable syllabics." What Mr. Murabito meant to say was not, however, “variable syllabics,” but rather “quantitative syllabics,” because the lines, although syllabic, are not variable but “fixed” from stanza to stanza: all first lines are the same length; all second lines, though they may be a different length from the first or later lines, are the same length, and so on. "Heterometric" would mean something like "a jumble of all sorts and kinds of meters,” not a mixture of line lengths. Here is the poem that Murabito was discussing:

MY COUNTRY WIFE

My country wife bends to rinse.Her skirt is

unwrinkled.Its print of flowers rounds

out her womb like the rug of violets

that mounds or dimples the chapel

burying ground.She would be grotesque where

hydrants irrigate gutters.

Here, she is a sleight of the moon; the sound

a mole makes.She bends and carries.She

cooks and smiles her meals down my throat.I need

no teeth.She has done what the bee

does to clover.The sun moves around.She

stays and stays.She sweeps and cooks.

The term "heterometric" might make sense if one meant "a commingling of (say) accentual prosody and syllabic prosody," on the model of"heterosexual," but there is already a term for a commingling of accentuals and syllabics; it's called "accentual-syllabic prosody," and it may be written in lines each of which contains the same number of “verse feet” (normative accentual-syllabics), or quantitative accentual-syllabics, or variable accentual-syllabics, which is what “Caravel” is written in.

If there were only two verse prosodies available, in order to write a “heterometrical” poem one would have to mingle syllabics, accentuals, accentual-syllabics, and isoverbal (word-count) prosody, a four-way heterometical "system." But it wouldn't be much of a system, would it? Though it might be what one might call, appropriately, "perverse."

Here is the Murabito review in its entirety (to view it properly, click on it):

In your e-mail, did you mean the term "heterometric," which is discussed?The irregular or "false Pindaric" ode, out of Cowley, through Wordsworth, and thence to Frost.

Sam Gwynn

Sam,

Of COURSE I mean "heterometric," NOT "hypermetric." I'm getting senile already. The term "heterometric" is not listed in the O.E.D., let alone The Book of Forms.

Lew

Lew,

I'm still not sure what a heterometric is, it's not in my American Heritage or OED — I think I'm a homometric, which I guess means I can't marry another homometric.

Bob Mezey

Bob,

It means nothing, far as I can make out. I think somebody just wanted to invent a term and see if it would fly. That person should have invented a tern instead.

Lew

Lew,

Molly-the-Wonder-Cat has been occupying the keyboard and making your incisive article rather furry. Fur is welcome this chill day, less so the pawses on the keyboard of each little hoof ... but thanks much for the link, and the insights it leads to. I have your essay printed out for purrusal in an easier spot. It will likely end up as one further addendum to my copy of TBoF, which is already well inset with appropriate items and bookmarks.

December 13, 2008

Yes, the idiot in this newspaper story is yours truly. All is on the mend.

Sam.

I have a chair like that. It can put you to sleep. That must be what happened to you. For a moment there you had red hair. Glad you're all right. I had a similar experience while I was teaching in Potsdam '68-'69> I went to a doctor to have a couple of growths removed from my scalp. He decided to burn them out, but before he did he disinfected the area with alcohol. I suddenly felt him and his nurse whacking me on the head with the palms of their hands: he'd set me afire. He cut the second one out with a pair of surgical scissors while I sat ensconced in his chair.

Great name for a fire chief! Or any man, I'd say. Now all you have to do is find a woman named Vaginasdaughter to put out the flame in your pubes.

Reminds me of three file cards I found at BuPers my last year in the Navy - Lunger, Crapper, and Glasscock. I thought they'd make a fine law firm.

Lew

Actually I
was out of the chair and seated on a quite different kind--white
porcelain.When I returned, the
flames were a'risin'.Lost a lot
of poetry books.Send me a new Book
of Forms one of these
days.

Sam

I will send
you one on Monday, my xmas gift with commiserations for your adversities.

Lew

It must
have been a helluva massage!

Roy Howe

In a chaise pour massage, our friend Sam

made
himself just as snug as a clam

till
the gizmo defied him

and
just about fried him

and
served him with pancakes and ham.

Rhina

It takes a special person to own up. Or a person who knew his
cover was already blown.

Tim Summerlin

Good God Sam!!!! What
were you thinking???? I hope Captain Penis-son.....took good care of
you and that you are NOT permanently damaged....

Love, Co

Oh, Dear!

FOR OUR FRIEND SAM

The chair he sat on like a burning throne

Flared in his office for a failed massage,

While all around him poems went up in flames

As their creators hoped they would some day.

It was a conflagration of the art

Much to be desired by mincing Logans

And others of that ilk. O mighty pyre,

That saves the critic from a chore to read,

Why should a garden hose rescue a poem?

If only it had spewed forth Maker’s Mark

We should have seen the Burning Man of art.

Yet still our friend lives on to blaze and write

Another book review, another rite

Of sanity disposed of in his prose.

Shine forth, O Burning Man, and in the night

May thy new-dappled nose dispel the gloom

Like reindeer guiding Santa’s laden sleigh.

Composed with love between courses of a reasonably good
dinner,

Dave Mason

Sam,

I truly had no idea how prescient I was when I wrote your epitaph long ago:

R.I.P.R. S. GWYNN

May 13 1948

He made us laugh, he made us giggle,

But now he makes the earthworms wiggle,

He smoked until they let him in:

Here lie the ashes of R. S. Gwynn.

Lew

Sam, this gives a whole
new meaning to being in the hot-seat!But I'm very glad you're okay; those heating-pad
things are dangerous, and it could have been a whole lot worse.

Marilyn

TEXAS POET SURVIVES
ELECTRIC CHAIR!(and I just wonder who wrote up that marvelous article with a
title just made for poetry?... in fact,the entire ordeal seems poetry-ready!) Now HEAL, SAM!

was finally published today, May 2nd, 2009. A number of people have ordered copies, which have been mailed, and many others have asked for details; here they are, together with the Foreword and Acknowledgments:

Satan’s
scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England
1580-1697 is a book of history, a chronicle of the period when the Age of
Sympathetic Magic, which had been the system by which mankind operated from
time immemorial, was beginning to shift over to the Age of Science, “The New
Philosophy,” by which the world would be increasingly governed from then forward.
The main focus of the book is upon the Putnam family of Buckinghamshire, in
England, from the birth of John Putnam, born in 1580, some of whose descendants
would be deeply involved in the last gasp of sympathetic magic, the great witchcraft
explosion of Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692, which is the climax of the
book.

The volume
not only looks at all the witchcraft cases in England and New England
during the period covered, but it also tells the stories of the major scientists
and Adepts of sympathetic magic (often the two were the same) in Europe and
America. The effect is twofold: First, the method is strictly chronological,
unfolding like a tapestry year by year. As one thread of the tapestry swells
and tapers off, others appear and interweave with one another. Second, the
history is told from the point of view of common people, the Puritans of
England and New England primarily, but also the crystal gazers, alchemists,
alleged witches and their accusers, and those ordinary citizens caught up in
the webs woven by plotters, liars, “possessed” children and their parents, and,
of course, the clerics.

Furthermore,
this is the period when America was settled, when Oliver Cromwell and the
Roundheads carried out their Puritan revolution, and all the politics and
machinations of the relevant sovereigns and courtiers of the period are also a
part of the tapestry here woven.

One is
probably saying to oneself at this point, “It’s too complicated and confusing.”
But when one begins to read the book one discovers that things start out clear,
and they stay clear throughout. Everything in it is true. All the incidents
took place in the real world, according to my historical sources (which are
exhaustive — A bibliography is appended), and this depiction of the Salem witchcraft
trials is the most complete and accurate that has ever been written, many errors
and misprisions having been corrected.

I wish to
acknowledge those who have helped and inspired me in this project. The first person
to encourage my writing on the subject was Dr. Eleanor Michel of Meriden,
Connecticut, High School for whose 11th grade English class in
1950-51 I wrote an addendum — an extra concluding chapter, a postscript — to The
House of the Seven Gables, in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne [http://www.nightsandweekends.com/articles/09/NW0900132.php].

At about the
same time four of us at Meriden High founded the Fantaseers Science-Fiction
Reading Club which grew to include (Rev.) Ben Barnes, Pierre Bennerup, Bill
Burns, (Prof.) Lindsey Churchill, the late Phineas Gay, (Rev.) George Hangen,
George Lallos, the late Jack Rule, (Rev.) Ray Staszewski, George Veillette,
(Rev.) Arthur von Au, and Paul Wiese — the Black Thirteen who provided me with
Faustian fellowship, evil escapades, vile volumes, and the opprobrious
opportunity to do my second (very imaginative) writing on the subject of the
Salem Village witchcrafts: A Senior Day skit, a photograph of which appears on
page 139 of my book Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, published
in 2005 [also by Star Cloud Press].

Next, I beg the
indulgence of the Research Foundation of State University of New York for
providing me with a Faculty Fellowship during the summer of 1974, under which I
was to write a volume of poetry but, inasmuch as I had begun this book in the
spring, I finished the first draft instead. I did nothing with it thereafter
beyond query a few publishers who seemed not much interested in it because of
its length, so I put it away until the spring of 2006 when I rewrote it as I
typed it into my new MacBook Pro computer.

I wish to
express my deep gratitude to several librarians for their help in my research:
Eleanor S. Adams of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts,
for her early and kind assistance; Dorothy Mozley, Genealogy and Local History
Librarian of the Springfield City Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, for her
help with the Springfield witchcraft cases of 1646 and 1651, and Cecilia
Caneschi, Reference Librarian of the Meriden, Connecticut, Public Library for
her great help with the Benham Wallingford witchcraft cases of 1691, 1692, and
1697.

The
description of the Vale of Aylesbury at the beginning of this book is in fact
very largely that of Eben Putnam, not myself, taken from his Putnam genealogies
(see Bibliography). Inasmuch as he explored the area, and I have not, I thought
it as well to leave his descriptions largely as he wrote them. I thought it
fitting, too, that this scholar of the Putnam family, who spent such enormous
amounts of time and work researching his people, thus making the Putnams one of
the most thoroughly documented families in America, ought to leave his imprint
on these pages in some way other than statistically, for his two genealogies
were published in limited editions (though I have made them available from
University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Over the
years I have met or known many people who are descended from the folk depicted
here including my dear friend, the late poet Constance Carrier of New Britain,
Connecticut; Curtis Disbrow, the husband of my sister-in-law Anne Disbrow of
Meriden; my cousin-in-law Gary Getchell of Cedar Grove, Maine; Lindsey
Churchill and the late Jack Rule, both Fantaseers; the Maine artist Margaret
Macy, a descendant of Rebecca Nurse; the Cleveland poet Mary Oliver; the late
novelist John Cheever, who angrily informed me in my living room in Oswego, New
York, that the character Ezekiel Cheever of Salem Village was fictional, having
been invented by Arthur Miller for his play The Crucible — John did
not stop fuminguntil I showed him his forebear’s testimony in the Salem Witchraft
trial records; my correspondent of almost forty years, the great fantasist Ray
Bradbury, and there were two Drs. Mather, father and son (but doctors of
medicine, not divinity — both Roman catholics!) in Oswego where I lived and
taught for thirty-one years at the State University of New York College at
Oswego, and where I wrote the first draft of this volume.

I wish to express my
deepest gratitude to my wife, Jean, who helped me with the chore of working on
the index of this book, the most grueling task she has suffered since the
school year 1968-1969 when she carried most of the physical labor of typing and
editing two manuscripts, The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco, my father, and The
Literature of New York: A Selective Bibliography of Colonial and Native New
York State Authors.

Lewis Putnam
Turco

Dresden
Mills, Maine

Tuesday,
December 2nd, 2008

REMARKS

Camden, Maine

March 31, 2009

To: Lewis
Turco

Dear Sir:

I have to
admit enjoying your lecture of Sunday, March 29, in double time (military term)
because of its double concentration on witchcraft and Reverend George
Burroughs. Then seeing your volume, Satan's Scourge, on
the front table I realized you may have written the most comprehensive modern
treatment of the epic yet. And I suppose you have.

But prime
purpose of this letter is to say I have begun to read your tome and greatly
thank you for the labors you invested in it.

Sincerely,

Robert Manns

Playwright

Libby, Montana

Putnam Turco
—

I just
received Satan's Scourge, and what an enormous work it is.
I've only had time to flip through it but already love an incident with two
guys, a clay pipe and a horse's ass. 725 pages and over 80 pages of index! It
is extremely rare that a piece of scholarship is also so readable. You are the
right kind of writer to do scholarship; to show them that the material can be
assembled and even analysed…and yet be a page turner.

If I can
conquer this thing in a decent time range, I'd love to try a review. Is there
some place you'd like me to try to get it in — a literary journal, maybe, and
the name of an editor who would think the was a good idea? I'd like to help you
sell it.

So
congratulations on getting yet another major book out of your thickening brain.

John
Herrmann

Novelist

John,

Thanks for your
great letter! Yours is the first response to the book that I’ve received from a
writer, and it means a lot to me to hear what you have to say about its
readability.

Lew

Lew,

Your history makes
me breathless. It doesn't stop for even a coffee break. I don't know what I
could say about it other than it is a complete — over-complete — readable
tracking of a great evil by well meaning people — your relatives, mostly. I can
do a paragraph for Amazon.com, but I am not the reviewer for this. If you've
read any of Blake Bailey's biographies (most recent, Cheever, but the Yates
book is relentlessly complete) I would say that they are fine, but what's to
review? I guess I'm just not able to review anything other than fiction, and
then not all fiction, as I did the first review of Solzhenitsyn's August1914
and could only review the awful language of the translation. I guess because
S's work has always been mostly history. But I will say that your Satan book
does not dramatize, and that's the stuff that I would pick up for reviewing. In
the end, the whole thing moves too fast for me to find a place to begin talking
about it. I will say that I was stunned at many of those really nutty women.

At times your
narration seems to be slightly 17th century. Maybe not "your" prose
but your sources' choices of expressions?

John Herrmann

John,

The dialogue in Satan’s
Scourge is the actual recorded
words of the original characters in it. What I did is go through the
depositions of the witnesses and the trial records, and if someone said that
something happened at a particular time, in a particular place and year, I
simply moved the incident being described back in the chronology to the point where
the witnesses said it happened. Therefore, nearly all characterizations of
people and descriptions of events are taken from the actual dialogues and
monologues of the people involved. That’s why the language in the mouths of the
people speaking it is archaic, because it is, indeed, archaic language.

The only
characterizations of people in the book that I invented are derived from the
horoscopes I cast of the main characters on their birthdays (knowing
beforehand, of course, how things developed in their stories). I hope that does
two things: Gives the reader an opening sense of the adults those characters
would become and portents of the events in which they were eventually involved.

I’m glad you like
the book.

Lew

Beacon, New York

Congratulations, Lew.

I hope it fares well.
I've talked it up to a few folks and passed on the link to your site for
orders. I never wrote a review but I might get to that yet. Trying to keep a
day job gets tough enough some days.

For me, it rekindled a
fascination I had with the competition between magic, science, and religion. I
had always thought that science won, and that was it — reason would reign for
good. But our need or desire for religion and magic are like an addiction, and
we must ever be watchful of that, just as a real addict knows that the bottle
is not the solution, and causes more harm than the immediate pleasure or
feeling of safety it brings.

For what it's worth, it
reminds me of a song written by one of my favorite musicians, Neil Peart, of
the Canadian band called Rush:

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.